Sony VPL-VW1000ES 4K home projector pictures and hands-on

Last month, the Sony VPL-VW1000ES was announced; the company's first 4K projector designed with the living room in mind.

Over in Japan, at CEATEC, the company used its opening press conference to show off the 4096 x 2160 monster, and Pocket-lint was on hand to take a butcher's.

The VPL-VW1000ES packs a SXRD 0.74-inch LED panel and the company was keen to stress that it boasts an LSI processing super-resolution video display database. Picture-wise, there's a 1,000,000:1 dynamic contrast, 120Hz refresh rate and four times the pixel count of your Full HD telly.

It's also able to upscale your 1080p footage, as well as displaying Full HD 3D and 4K upscaling 3D movies. The SXRD panel has been optimised for minimum light reflection and the size of each pixel has been reduced from 7μm to 4μm.

Sony also announced at the conference that the PS3 will get a firmware update at the beginning of 2012 that will allow it to natively output 4K stills. No word on moving pictures though.

The 4K projector looks a lot like the aliens from the Speilberg War of the World movie. And we don't just mean the lens/eye part. It's about as big as the movie's baddies. It's a whopper, measuring in at 520 x 200 x 640mm and weighing the best part of 20kg.

Not surprisingly, the VPL-VW1000ES doesn't come cheap. It's priced at ¥1.68 million - more than £14,000.

Unfortunately, we didn't manage to get eyes-on with any of the Sony 4K video; we had a Lost in Translation moment (minus any sexy shenanigans with Scarlett Johansson, unfortunately) with Sony's Japanese PR team.

But we're hoping to get a demo during the show at some point, so we'll update the story and let you know how we got on.